On the day he would close the biggest deal of his life, Ryan Kavanaugh watched the sun rise from the 29th-floor conference room of one of Manhattan's most prestigious law firms.

It had been a long, anxious night at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. As a wet snow began to fall outside, Kavanaugh, two lawyers, and a banker entered their 22nd straight hour negotiating the pact that would mark Wall Street's richest investment ever in Hollywood. Empty Dasani water bottles, crumpled M&M's wrappers, and thousands of pages of discarded drafts littered the huge, blond-lacquered conference table where the four men faced one another. They were reading the latest version of the deal, aptly nicknamed Mulholland Drive, after the most famously twisted street in Los Angeles.

This was the kind of high-stakes poker game at which Kavanaugh excelled. Even his enemies gave him that. In three years, he had helped funnel more than $3 billion of hedge fund, private equity, and bank money into the movie business. This deal would mean as much as $1.2 billion more for a potential avalanche of 45 films—if Kavanaugh could reel it in.

Red-haired and impish, the 32-year-old wore jeans, a wrinkled white dress shirt, and a pair of navy Converse sneakers. During lulls when documents were being printed, Kavanaugh played Blackhawk Striker, a computer game that he'd somehow figured out how to display on the room's 13-foot screen.

Every clause in Mulholland Drive—and there were hundreds of them—had to be vetted by three parties: Citigroup, Sony Pictures, and Kavanaugh's company, Relativity Media. That made for a complex, triangular dance executed by more than a dozen people—some in the room, others in adjoining offices, and a few on the phone from their homes in Los Angeles, where it was still the middle of the night.

After five months of negotiations, most of the issues left were the sort of what-if clauses common in such deals—convoluted hypotheticals that spelled out who'd do what for whom if things didn't work out as planned.

At every impasse, Kavanaugh practiced emergency shuttle diplomacy. First he'd retreat to an office dubbed the Sony Room, where he'd sit alone, phone in hand, relaying Citigroup's concerns to the studio's lawyers in California. Next he'd head down the hall to a second office, where two young, bleary-eyed Relativity executives crunched numbers on their laptops. Then he'd circle back to the conference room, where Citigroup's lawyer waited with Alfred Griffin, a director of Citigroup's markets-and-banking unit. Even at 7 a.m., Griffin was still wearing his dark-blue suit jacket, his red patterned tie perfectly knotted.

With everyone, Kavanaugh played the role of confidant. "I don't want you to be unhappy," he soothed them. "I don't want you to close the deal just to close it. I want you to be happy."

Then, around noon, an argument about certain funding guarantees that had been simmering for hours suddenly boiled over. It was a deal killer.

Kavanaugh quickly grabbed a pen and a yellow legal pad and scribbled an equation that took up most of the page. The answer he mapped out made everybody feel, if not exactly happy, at least sufficiently protected.

Just after 4 p.m., seven signatures—some scanned and emailed, others scribbled right there—were attached to the final document on Kavanaugh's laptop. He typed in the addresses of everyone who needed a copy, then waved Griffin over and let the banker click send.

Kavanaugh summed it up like this: "I got them to a place where everybody didn't get exactly what they wanted; they got what they needed."

By "everybody," Kavanaugh meant himself too.

Hollywood and Vine will always be the most famous corner in the history of the film business. But the future of movies is now being constructed at an imaginary intersection: Hollywood and Wall Street. At this crossroads, no one directs more traffic than Ryan Kavanaugh.

Some call him a visionary. Others, no more than a confidence man. In fact, Kavanaugh is Los Angeles' answer to Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider at the center of Wall Street, one of his favorite movies. Like Gekko, Kavanaugh is quick-witted and relentless, and believes devoutly in the primacy of making money. His four biggest deals linking Hollywood and "my guys," as he likes to call hedge funds and banks, have yielded a commitment of more than $500 million-each. The deals have helped fund films that range from popcorn fare (the action fantasy Ghost Rider) to literary adaptations (the upcoming Atonement, from the award-winning novel by Ian McEwan).

Now, Mulholland Drive will take Kavanaugh to another level. He has always collected fees for putting investors together with studios, like a handful of other middlemen in town who make their money no matter how the movies perform. But this deal will give Kavanaugh both fees and an ownership stake in the movies themselves—meaning he will share in the risks and rewards (proceeds from worldwide theater tickets, pay-per-view deals, DVDs, and merchandise). Add Kavanaugh's youth and lack of an M.B.A., and it's no surprise that the onetime aspiring rock guitarist has become the most controversial figure in the secretive world of Hollywood finance.

"You're going to hear tons of criticism," barks Harvey Weinstein, a movie mogul who is working on several deals with Kavanaugh. "Dismiss it for the absolute envious nonsensical gossip that it is. Any investment banker who says anything negative about Ryan—as I've heard a few of them say—is jealous." Weinstein says such static is driven by one simple fact: Kavanaugh is making money that used to go into other people's pockets. "I've heard, 'He's the devil. You can't do business with him.' Then you hang out with Ryan, and he's smarter than all five of the guys who told me he's the Antichrist put together."

Kavanaugh's critics charge that he embraces a certain plasticity of truth—often stressing the possible over the probable. In Hollywood, this kind of salesmanship is admired. On Wall Street, however, it can raise eyebrows. Some allege that he will say almost anything to close a deal, making promises he may not be able to keep.

As evidence, they point to Kavanaugh's first major enterprise, a venture capital firm he launched at age 22. Four years later, he shuttered it. The firm's failures resulted in five lawsuits, one of which yielded a $7.7 million judgment in favor of an investor (who is still trying to collect).

"I have nothing to hide," Kavanaugh says one night over a late sushi dinner. "I've made money and lost money." An hour-a-day treadmill runner who tries to never touch carbs, he eats four dinners a week at Nobu Malibu, not far from the three-bedroom oceanfront beach house he rents. He chopsticks a piece of toro tartare—"comfort food" to his mouth and adds, "When I was 22, I had a multimillion-dollar house and two Ferraris, and I was flying private. At 26, I was like, 'How am I going to pay my rent?' But it's the crash you learn from."

After his V.C. fund sank, "Ryan had no credibility," says Mark Canton, the former production chief of Warner Bros. and chairman of Columbia Tristar who was one of Kavanaugh's investors. "He's gained credibility rather quickly."

Canton declines to say exactly how he fared in Kavanaugh's fund, noting that some investments are still pending. But its poor performance, he says, "didn't cause me to lose confidence in the bigger picture.

"Ryan's a finisher. That's what we like. He's really good at marketing his product. And his product is him."

The V.C. fund, however, isn't the only strike against Kavanaugh. There's also Virtual Studios, a partnership he brokered in 2005 between Warner Bros. and Stark Investments, a Wisconsin-based hedge fund, that until this spring had released nothing but duds. Virtual invested $537 million in seven Warner Bros. movies. The most expensive one, the $160 million remake Poseidon, was one of last year's most embarrassing flops; three others released in 2006 were box office disappointments.

But instead of running for the hills, Stark continues to invest with Kavanaugh. According to people close to the hedge fund, it has bought into several other ventures he's championed, including a $700 million fund he set up last year to finance 19 films with Sony and Universal. In fact, Kavanaugh helped persuade Stark to buy in at the equity level—the riskiest slice of the investment.

To understand that risk, think of a movie's revenue as a waterfall. The studio, sitting on the highest ledge under the torrent, is compensated first, for marketing and distribution. Then gulps are taken by top actors, directors, and the guilds. Near the bottom of the waterfall sit investors like the ones Kavanaugh brings in, who typically kick in half the financing but drink only if there is enough water trickling down. First come the lower-risk investors, who commonly earn an 8 percent return on their money; then the "mezzanine" level, who are promised about 15 percent; and at the very bottom, the equity level, who own a piece of a movie's ongoing revenue, if any. For a blockbuster, this can mean a flood. For a bomb, it means they lose everything.

The risk is increased by the fact that studios have traditionally kept their most lucrative franchises off the table. Warner Bros. won't let investors in on the Harry Potter movies, Sony holds back the Spider-Man franchise, and Disney keeps its Pirates of the Caribbean series for itself. Of the major studios, only 20th Century Fox allows investors to participate in all its films.

So why would Stark executives keep pouring their money into Hollywood? Are they gluttons for punishment, or is Kavanaugh the greatest huckster since P.T. Barnum? In fact, according to several people with knowledge of the deal, Virtual's performance problems were due to Stark, not Kavanaugh. He had advised them to invest in only one movie—300, an astute pick that broke box office records when it debuted in March. Instead, Stark wanted to invest in more pictures and approved a group Warner Bros. proposed that, despite 300's success, has so far lost money. (Two more of the Virtual films with Warner Bros.—Nancy Drew and the Brad Pitt western The Assassination of Jesse James—have yet to open.) A spokesperson for Stark declined to comment.

Furthermore, insiders say, Warner Bros. has agreed to make Stark happier by sweetening the terms for Nancy Drew and Jesse James; Sony will likely do the same for its outside investors. "Before, when Wall Street's investment was a couple of hundred million here, a couple hundred million there, it could come or go," explains Kavanaugh. "But now it's such an integral part of the business, [studios] can't let it fail."

Movie industry folks seem to have the same feeling about Kavanaugh. Some of the same 500-odd investors from his early financial misadventures—many of them big Hollywood names—are doing business with him again, though this time, instead of writing him a check, they're getting him to raise the money. They include Canton, now a producer, whose company owes its initial financing to Kavanaugh; Jim Wiatt, C.E.O. of the William Morris Agency, which has several clients working on films backed by Kavanaugh; and producer Charles Roven (Batman Begins, Scooby-Doo), who is making a heist picture largely financed by Kavanaugh's company.

In Hollywood, ''not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads," F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Last Tycoon. Richard Saperstein, the president of production for the Weinstein brothers' Dimension Films, is one who puts Kavanaugh in that elite group.

"He's just about the quickest person I've ever seen in a room," says Saperstein, who recently sought Kavanaugh's help in resolving a deal that had been at a stalemate for months. "Within a few minutes of hearing where everyone was coming from, he created an equation in front of us. I'm not idealizing the guy, but it was like he was doing a higher math."

"Ryan is really much smarter than he appears to be," his father, Jack, says one brisk January evening, grinning at his elder son across the vast dining room table at the family's home in L.A.'s wealthy Brentwood. Ryan's mother, Leslie, who shares his red hair and his personal trainer, has already pried the BlackBerrys away from her husband and son. As a uniformed server offers a basket of cheese crostini, the talk turns to Ryan's upbringing. It is time to tell the piggy bank story.

Once upon a time, when Ryan was six years old, he saved $57.94. His father instructed him to read the stock tables and list his preferred stocks and his reasons for choosing them in a notebook. Then he took the first-grader to see a stockbroker in Beverly Hills. Ryan bought single shares of Amgen, I.T.T., Citicorp, and a few others. The dividends were reinvested year after year. When Ryan turned 16, the account was worth more than $24,000.

Soon after, young Ryan started several businesses. He put vending machines in the office where his mom worked as a real estate agent. He also teamed up with a partner licensed to sell pepper spray, which he hawked to his mom's friends. Around the same time, Ryan took his $24,000 and tore through it. "I went on a lot of dates," he says.

Kavanaugh says he has two role models: Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire wheeler-dealer, and his own father. Of the two, the elder Kavanaugh may be the harder act to follow.

Son: He speaks six languages.

Dad: Nine.

Son: He used to work out with Lou Ferrigno. Dad bench-pressed 545.

Dad: 565.

Son: He was extreme skiing and fractured his leg. Now it's a half-inch shorter than the other.

Dad: One and a half inches.

Like any family, the Kavanaughs have many favorite stories. There's the one about Ryan's paternal grandfather, a Polish immigrant who worked as a steel-press operator for 40 cents an hour and changed the family surname from Koniacpulski to Konitz. Then there's the one about Ryan's dad—who'd changed his name to Kavanaugh—breaking his neck. He didn't realize it for months because his overdeveloped muscles held his head up. And there's the one in which Ryan's dad, forced to abandon a dentistry practice because of that same neck injury, got his M.B.A. and became a partner at an investment firm, then in his forties got his M.D. and started teaching eye surgery.

"Jack went through a lot of changes, ups and downs," says Ryan's mom. "And Ryan saw that."

No wonder that, with this family history, Ryan's most staggering setback is told as a tale of perseverance.

This story opens at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where Ryan studied very little, pierced his ears (one of them twice), joined a band called Shades of Grey, and resolved to play guitar for a living. Dismayed, his father promised to never nag his son again if he would cut his shoulder-length hair and take a summer internship at the brokerage firm Dean Witter Reynolds. Reluctantly, Ryan agreed. The decision, he says, "changed everything." By summer's end, Dean Witter offered Ryan a full-time job. He took it and transferred to U.C.L.A. (where he is still eight credits short of a diploma). But just months later, at the end of 1996, he left the job to start his own venture capital firm. He asked his dad for a $50,000 loan but was turned down.

"Who's going to give a 22-year-old any money?" Ryan's father asked. The answer, it turned out, was lots of people. Ryan's first investors were college friends. But then he signed up the producer Jon Peters, for whom Ryan's uncle had done some construction work, and Hollywood's doors flew open. Peters was soon joined by Terry Semel, then co-chairman of Warner Bros.; Jonathan Dolgen, then chairman of Viacom Entertainment; and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

 
At 23, Ryan got married to a model. "That was when I was a little schmuck," he recalls. Two years later, they were divorced, and Ryan's V.C. fund was also headed for ruin.

Son: They gave me a $500 million ship, I learned how to sail it, and then there was an iceberg.

Dad: But the most incredible thing is how he recovered from it. It's unreal.

Michael Sitrick, one of the country's best-known crisis-P.R. execs, would agree that Ryan's financial recovery was unreal. But he'd mean something very different by it.

Sitrick has specialized in controversial celebrities (Don King, Wesley Snipes); executives (supermarket magnate Ron Burkle; Hewlett-Packard's former chairwoman, Patricia Dunn); and companies (Halliburton, Global Crossing). He and his wife were friends of Ryan's parents, with whom they had celebrated Passover more than once. In March 2000, Sitrick invested $6.2 million in Ryan's venture capital fund.

Two years later, Sitrick sued Ryan, alleging that, despite assurances that no more than 25 percent of Sitrick's money would be invested in private securities, his entire investment was put into two private companies on whose boards Ryan sat: a startup that sold prepaid credit cards and an interactive TV company that later went bankrupt.

The fund's failure strained Ryan's relationship with his father. Dad wrote to Sitrick asserting that he had never been a director or officer of Ryan's firm—despite promotional materials that named Dad as president and chief investment officer. Any such representation, the elder Kavanaugh wrote, "may have been motivated by hopeful anticipation."

Sitrick's suit went to an arbitrator, who found that while Jack Kavanaugh was "involved," the fund's "overall sloppiness" was due to Ryan, whose attempt to cast "blame for this negligence on the Fund, other personnel at the Fund, or even on his father, is to no avail."

Sitrick was awarded a $7.7 million judgment. Since Ryan had claimed he was broke, Sitrick agreed to let him off the hook with several conditions, including his cooperation in a suit against Ryan's insurance companies. One insurance company was subsequently forced to cough up $1.2 million. And that would be the end of it—or so Ryan thought.

In the wake of his firm's failure, Kavanaugh immediately set about remaking himself. Jon Peters' ex-wife Christine showed him the way. While on the set of her first movie, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, she asked Kavanaugh to go to Paramount Pictures to ensure she got a producing credit. His lack of experience didn't matter to her, she says, because "Ryan is the ultimate negotiator."

Several insiders point out that this mission required no great skill because Peters had recently been dating Sumner Redstone, the C.E.O. of Viacom, which happens to own Paramount. Nevertheless, Peters and Kavanaugh recount this negotiation—which secured not only a producing credit and fee but also a three-year production deal for Peters-as a victory. "That's when I thought, Okay, I can do this Hollywood thing," Kavanaugh says.

First, he started a management company with former talent agent Pat Dollard, who had long represented director Steven Soderbergh. That lasted about a year, ending shortly after Dollard hopped a plane to Iraq to make a documentary in support of the war.

Kavanaugh was already onto a bigger idea. In 2004, as hedge funds' hunger for alternative asset classes continued to grow, he set out to turn Hollywood into a capital market. For years, Wall Street had lent Hollywood money. Now Kavanaugh and a small cadre of others (including Thomas Tull, who would strike a deal with Warner Bros., and Chip Selig, who would form an alliance with 20th Century Fox) believed that investors could be persuaded to take what amounted to equity stakes in studio films.

"At first, investors were like, 'What are you smoking?'" Kavanaugh recalls. To convince them, he employed a tool familiar to Wall Street: a computer-run "Monte Carlo simulation," which, when fed a range of variables, churns out likely outcomes. In this case, the program was set to predict the future performance of groups (or slates) of films.

Kavanaugh wasn't the first to apply such a simulation to Hollywood, and it wasn't bulletproof. Critics charge that such simulations are meaningless when applied to the movie business. "Some actors skyrocket to fame at 20, and at 40 nobody gives a damn about them," says Harold Vogel, the senior entertainment industry analyst at Merrill Lynch for 17 years and now a venture capitalist. "Others—Clint Eastwood, Alan Arkin—win an Oscar late in life. How do you put that variable in? The whole thing is faulty."

Kavanaugh's brainstorm was to use the potential revenue predicted by Monte Carlo simulations as collateral to secure financing. His first big deal, with Marvel Studios, used the movie rights to comic-book characters to land a $525 million revolving line of credit through Merrill Lynch. For Marvel, this meant it could transform itself from a licensor to a producer without risking company equity. For Kavanaugh—whose firm pocketed a $62,500 fee plus warrants to purchase 260,000 shares of Marvel stock—it meant a newly minted reputation as a go-to guy for hedge fund money.

In 2006, Kavanaugh cemented two cofinancing deals—dubbed Gun Hill Road I and II—that secured $1.3 billion in Wall Street money to make 37 films, among them hits like The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and misses like All the King's Men. It was the first time a slate deal had been done simultaneously with two studios—Sony and Universal. People with knowledge of the particulars say that his company was paid as much as $1 million per movie, some of which it was required to reinvest.

But just as Kavanaugh's future was brightening, his nemesis reemerged. Last September, Sitrick petitioned a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to enforce the judgment for $7.7 million, plus interest. Sitrick was now alleging that Kavanaugh had hidden assets in 2002, including more than $616,000 he reaped from the sale of a house.

In October, Kavanaugh sued Sitrick for breaching the contract he signed agreeing not to collect. Kavanaugh later withdrew that charge, but his suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in the fall, still asks for declaratory relief from Sitrick's claim.

One afternoon in February, Kavanaugh pulls out a fat three-ring binder stuffed with bank and brokerage statements from 2002 that he says show total balances of less than $350. Then, with a flourish, he produces court-ordered liens on his earnings from the same period—the result of a lawsuit filed by his ex-wife—that he says show he was thousands of dollars in the red.

"I never thought I'd be so happy to look back and remember how broke I actually was," he says.

Sitrick's response? "We remain confident we will prevail."

Relativity media, Kavanaugh's company, occupies a suite of offices on the fifth floor of a nondescript office building on Beverly Boulevard. The place has industry provenance-in the early '70s, it housed the talent agency International Creative Management, and Kavanaugh's midsize office used to be occupied by I.C.M. chairman and C.E.O. Jeff Berg. But compared with Hollywood's other seats of power, where sun shines through vast glass atriums and original artwork and freshly cut flowers vie for a visitor's eye, Relativity is a relative dump.

In the company's meeting room, a Talladega Nights movie poster is the only adornment, and the padding in eight black faux-leather armchairs has lost its oomph. On a recent morning, Kavanaugh apologizes, saying new furniture is on order. Still, this is the room where he's most effective, because here he can "think in pictures."

"Anybody who knows me will say, 'Give Ryan a chalkboard and a marker, and it's done,'" he says, jumping up to write some equations on a big whiteboard. He starts with a red marker, then switches to yellow, then orange. He adds arrows to show where money comes in and goes out. In minutes, the board resembles John Madden's breakdown of a safety blitz.

Lynwood Spinks smiles like he's seen this movie before. The lanky Hollywood veteran worked at four major studios before he "bet the farm on Ryan," becoming his partner in 2004 after meeting him across the table in a negotiation. "You're like the Energizer bunny," Spinks tells Kavanaugh in a gentle Alabama drawl. "We always say his glass is not half full; it's overflowing. Mine," Spinks adds, "is cracked."

What Spinks doesn't say, but what many who spend time with Kavanaugh discover, is that his unflagging optimism sometimes leads him to assert what he wants to be true. He'll say he's financing a film 100 percent, when in fact there's a minority backer. He'll say he's suing Sitrick for $45 million; in fact, he isn't but, when pushed, says he plans to reassert that claim later. He'll say he has a no-carb rule, then rip open a bag of Ruffles.

That's where Spinks, 54, comes in. He doesn't deal with Wall Street. "Ryan talks to the financial world," he says. "I don't." But he gives Kavanaugh Hollywood cred. Even those who have reasons to be wary have, with some coaxing from Spinks, come back around.

Chuck Roven, for example. If you'd asked the producer about Kavanaugh five years ago, he says, "I wouldn't have wanted to run into another transaction with him." The reason: When Roven put his money into one of Kavanaugh's early ventures, he was disappointed to learn that other investors had access to a cheaper share price.

Kavanaugh fixed that discrepancy after Roven complained. And Roven says his investments will end up making money. Nevertheless, the pricing issue was, he says, "something I should have been made aware of."

But then, last year, Spinks reached out to Roven. The resulting lunch led to Relativity arranging most of the financing for a $25 million film that Roven is producing. At the last minute, when $3 million worth of financing fell out, Roven says, Kavanaugh proved he could be counted on. "He put up his own money to keep the production going until we solved the problem,'' Roven says. ''If it wasn't for him, the movie would have come crashing down."

Midnight in Malibu: Kavanaugh arrives home in his silver Aston Martin Vantage V8 Roadster after another late sushi dinner. The workday isn't over: A promotional reel for an upcoming western, 3:10 to Yuma, awaits his appraisal. The $63 million film, which stars Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, is one of several that Relativity is financing without a single dollar from a movie studio. He heads for his bedroom, where the treadmill is aimed at the ocean just yards away, and feeds a DVD into a player attached to a huge flat-screen TV.

"Not bad," he says, as six-guns blaze, Crowe smirks, and Bale looks, well, baleful.

Kavanaugh heads to the living room and plops down on a sectional couch, his navy Converse sneakers—he's got three pairs—stretched out in front of him; a favorite episode of South Park, "Trapped in the Closet," starts on yet another flat-screen.

Kavanaugh has seen the episode, in which Stan is chosen as the second coming of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, at least a dozen times. Still, he giggles when a Scientologist chides a dumbstruck Stan, "What's better than telling people a stupid story and having them believe you? Having them pay you for it, stupid."

There are those who believe Kavanaugh, too, is selling a story. Nevertheless, private investment in Hollywood shows no sign of slowing. In January 2007 alone, when the Mulholland Drive deal was done, four other major deals, promising nearly $1 billion more in third-party funding, were announced.

"Right now it's kind of wait and see," says Jim Wiatt of the William Morris Agency, acknowledging that many think the latest wave of private investment is headed for the rocks. To Wiatt, today's equation is simple: The more movies Wall Street helps finance, the more work there is for his agency's clients. "The worst-case scenario for all of us is that it doesn't last," he says.

Whether or not it lasts depends, of course, on the long-term performance of the movies investors choose to back. The recent success of 300 notwithstanding, many remain skeptical of Kavanaugh's ability to pick winners.

"Ryan has perfected the art of the deal, but that doesn't mean for sure he's a good picture picker," says Peter Guber, the former chairman of Sony Pictures, who is now a producer. He says he's a Kavanaugh fan. Mention Kavanaugh's faith in computer models, however, and Guber scoffs, "Yeah, right, right, right. I've heard all that stuff. I've been in the business 34 years, but I've only seen a few great picture pickers."

Kavanaugh has been called a snake-oil salesman but never a cineaste. Asked to name his favorite movies, he rattles off two from the '90s (True Romance and The Matrix) and two from the '80s (Somewhere in Time and, of course, Wall Street) before grinning and adding, "And every movie we've ever been involved in."

But here's the big picture: If Kavanaugh proves as good at identifying profitable movies as he is at financing them, he could be something rare indeed—a modern Monroe Stahr. Like Stahr, the protagonist of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Kavanaugh "[flew] up very high ... when he was young" and "stayed up there longer than most of us."

Even Kavanaugh won't predict how his own movie will end: "Sumner Redstone's a mogul. Kirk Kerkorian's a mogul. It's yet to be seen what I am."